Earth’s Crisis: On the Edge of the Roof

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This talk was given in 2015, yet it is as timely as ever. It views the ecological dis-ease of our planet through the lens of our evolutionary unfolding. We explore the egoic trance that has precipitated the destruction of our environment, and the inner practices of presence that enable us to respond from love and wisdom (from the archives).

When the animals come to us asking for our help, will we know what they are saying? When the plants speak to us in their delicate, beautiful language, will we be able to answer them? When the planet herself sings to us in our dreams, will we be able to wake ourselves and act?

~ Gary Lawless

NOTE: Tara is away this month and selected this talk from the archives for the podcast as especially appropriate.

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Meditation: Discovering Inner Space (28:02 min.)

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By imagining the space inside the body, we discover the continuous space of awareness that is the source and essence of all aliveness. This meditation is adapted from Open Focus Meditations led by Les Fehmi, Ph.D. in The Open Focus Brain.

Tara was away this week, so we’re posting a special favorite from prior years. Here’s the ending:

… Can you imagine the space that extends beneath you through earth and beyond and beyond past the furthest stars?

Can you imagine the space that extends above you… upward and outward past the furthest stars?

Can you imagine this space that fills your body… in this infinite space that extends in all directions is continuous… one continuous space?

Can you imagine the experience of this one continuous space… space inside you, the infinite space around you as it’s experienced at the heart… continuous space at the heart?

Can you imagine that all beings when awake experience the same continuous heartspace… belong to the same continuous heartspace?

Can you imagine in the silence now just letting go and being that continuous heart space?

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Four Ways to Support Teens’ Social-Emotional Development at School

According to a 2018 survey, many high school students don’t believe their schools have done enough to help them deal with stress (51 percent), understand their emotions (49 percent), and solve disagreements (46 percent), and fewer than half of graduates surveyed feel prepared for life after high school.

We’re learning that some social and emotional learning approaches simply aren’t as effective with teens as they are with children. When teaching relationship skills, teens can sometimes find direct teaching (in the form of lectures, videos, and homework) to be patronizing and heavy-handed. 

Why? Teens need more opportunities to dig deeper—to actively explore who they are, what drives them, and who they want to be in the world. So how can we better address teens’ developmental needs?

Researcher David Yeager and his colleagues argue that it’s important to address teens’ needs for status (“How do others treat me?”) and respect (“Am I granted the rights I expect to be granted as a student?”). If teens feel competent, autonomous, and valued in their community—if they have a sense of high status and respect, in other words—they’re likely to be more motivated and engaged.

Here are four ways you can help teens to develop greater self-awareness—and ultimately enhance their sense of status and respect among peers and adults.

1. Invite students to use their character strengths

If teens crave respect, it’s important to create a school climate where their strengths are recognized and valued.

Take time in class to have your students identify their personal strengths, such as hope, humility, honesty, kindness, and perseverance. You can begin by asking them to take a 10-minute online survey designed by positive psychology researchers.

After they learn about some of their key strengths, ask them to choose one strength to focus on every day for a week. Have them describe the strength in writing and propose several different ways they might use it each day, and challenge them to act on that strength throughout the week.

It’s easy for us to focus on our weaknesses and personal challenges, but when we spend time making the most of our positive qualities, we can build greater self-esteem and confidence.

For example, if a student wants to capitalize on kindness as a strength, he might perform a random act of kindness for a peer, write a thank-you note to a teacher, or volunteer to care for abandoned animals at a local shelter over the weekend.

As an alternative to focusing on one strength all week, they might choose to focus on a different strength each day. Whichever option they choose, have them write about what they did, how it made them feel, and what they learned from the experience.

Research tells us that this activity can increase well-being and reduce symptoms of depression. It’s easy for us to focus on our weaknesses and personal challenges, but when we spend time making the most of our positive qualities, we can build greater self-esteem and confidence.

2. Encourage students to imagine their best selves

Another way to help students clarify who they are and how they want to be in the world is to invite them to envision their ideal future.

Ask your students to respond to the following questions in a 15-minute free-write: What is the best possible life you can imagine? Consider all the areas in your life that are important to you—relationships, school, career, hobbies and interests, etc. Be as creative and imaginative as you want, and don’t worry about spelling and grammar.

Ask them to be as specific as possible, and tell them that it’s easy to focus on current obstacles to reaching goals, so they should let go and simply dream about the future and exactly what it could look like.

Researchers suggest that it’s important to create mindsets that blunt the power of perceived threats to teens’ status and respect, and this exercise can help students feel a greater sense of control as they clarify a vision of their future self.

3. Challenge students to explore their purpose

Once students have practiced using their character strengths and imagined their future selves, create opportunities for them to think about how they might contribute to something larger than themselves.

The Purpose Challenge Toolkit features research-based online activities that prompt students to imagine how they might leave their mark on the world—and make it a better place.

Here are some examples:

• Respond to these questions: “Imagine you’ve been given a magic wand, and you can change anything you want in the world. What would you want to be different and why? Is there anything you can do to help move the world closer to this ideal? If so, how?”
• Discuss what this Viktor Frankl quote means: “Those who have a ‘why’ to live can bear with almost any ‘how.’”
• Create a tattoo design that symbolizes the things that matter most to you.

Apart from these prompts, it’s crucial to connect students’ sense of purpose to what they’re learning. Are they studying social issues that matter to them? Are they learning as a means to an end—or to make a difference in the world?

4. Value student leadership in your school community

We can’t challenge adolescents to make a difference in the world without offering them opportunities to lead and be heard. High schools aren’t simply holding spaces for teens. They can be places where students test their wings, raise their voices, and learn how to effect change. In fact, students in schools with strong SEL programs and positive learning environments are more likely to report that their “voice” matters.

What does this look like beyond classroom-based suggestions (student-led conferences and class meetings, student-led instruction, and student choices in curriculum)? You can extend student influence at your school through peer mediation, mentoring, and buddy programs, as well as student-led community engagement and service learning opportunities.

We can’t challenge adolescents to make a difference in the world without offering them opportunities to lead and be heard.

However, you might also offer more students advisory roles on boards or in district-level committees. Invite their feedback and input on school policies, programs, assemblies, and even hiring decisions.

Finally, to inspire more widespread student investment in your school, consider a “Strength in Voices” conference “for students, by students, to inspire students.”  Michelle Hammond, student voice coordinator in the Washoe County School District in Reno, Nevada, supports an annual student-led event that features students’ strategies for improving their schools.

“One of the most important features of this event is that 80 percent of the students who are invited each year are randomly selected to assure a diverse representation of our 64,000 students,” explains Hammond. “And then we tap into that group to present at the event the following year, and/or to serve on our Student Advisory Councils.”

After participating in the “Strength in Voices” event, one student commented, “I have a stronger voice and can stand up for students who need it, while another encouraged peers, “Stay in school and speak up!”

Many of our students face significant obstacles in their lives due to factors beyond their control, like health challenges, poverty, and institutionalized racism. Prompting students to connect with their strengths, identify what matters most to them, and envision ways they might contribute to the world may ultimately help them to feel more respected and empowered.

This article originally appeared on Greater Good, the online magazine of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, one of Mindful’s partners. View the original article.

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A Practice to Welcome Everything

To welcome something doesn’t mean we have to like it, and it doesn’t mean we have to agree with it; it just means we have to be willing to meet it. We temporarily suspend our rush to judgment and are simply open to what’s occurring.

With welcoming comes the ability to work with what is present and what is unpleasant. After a while, we begin to discover that our happiness isn’t determined simply by what is external in our life but also what is internal. To be open means to embrace paradox and contradiction; it’s about keeping our minds and hearts available to new information, letting ourselves be informed by life. Openness welcomes the good times and the bad times as equally valid experiences. Openness is the basis of a skillful response to life.

Openness welcomes the good times and the bad times as equally valid experiences. Openness is the basis of a skillful response to life.

At the deepest level, this is an invitation to fearless receptivity. To welcome everything and push away nothing can’t be done as an act of will. This is an act of love.

Six Steps to Open Up to the Present Moment

Mostly, we think of mindfulness as bringing a very precise attention to what’s happening, as it’s happening. In this way, we bring an almost laser-like attention to our practice. We bring a careful moment-to-moment attention to sensation, to thoughts, to emotions. But sometimes this kind of precise attention can create a sort of tension or struggle in the mind.

This is when it’s more useful to try a practice that cultivates an open, boundless awareness. To develop a mind that is vast like space. To allow pleasant and unpleasant experiences to appear and disappear without struggle, resistance, or harm. 

So, let’s try this practice for welcoming everything and pushing away nothing.

1. Settle back into your seat, relax, and come into the breath and body. Maybe let your eyes close if that feels comfortable for you. Let your breathing be very natural.
2. Begin by being aware of the various sensations in your body: pressure, movement, tingling, the feel of the air on your hands and face. Just feel the waves of sensation.
3. Now, let go of the idea of arms and legs and a body. Become aware of the area above your head. How far does that space extend? Let your awareness sense what’s to the left of you. What’s to the right of you? Let your awareness come into the area below your body. Is there any vibration in your feet or the floor? Let your awareness extend to the area behind your body, so it fills the whole room. Let your awareness be aware of what’s in front of the body, extending out as far as it possibly can, so that there’s this sense of openness, of boundless space; and all of the activities of body, heart, and mind are appearing and disappearing in that open, welcoming space.
4. Allow all experience to arise without any interference—no inside, no outside. Relax your ownership of thoughts. Look and see the difference between being lost in thought and being mindful of thought. It’s like when a sound occurs in the room, or a bird flies by, you just notice the sound of the bird; you don’t think it’s you. Let it be that way with your thoughts and sensations, everything coming, everything going in a vast, open space. It can be helpful to think about what happens when you walk into a room: Most people see the chairs or tables or the objects in the room and fail to see the space.
5. Let yourself be aware of the space surrounding all the activity, all the coming and going. Remember, whatever we can give space to can move. Keep allowing all the thoughts, all the sensations, all the feelings to rise and disappear in the vast spaciousness, like clouds in the sky.
6. Finally, let your attention come to the awareness itself, vast, transparent, clear, not disturbed by anything that’s coming and going. Welcome everything, push away nothing.

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“Good Othering” – Helping Each Other Trust the Gold

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One of the great gifts we can offer is being a mirror of goodness, reminding one another that we can trust our essential awareness, light and love. Because our conditioning is to fixate on flaws, “good othering” takes intention and practice. This talk explores how we can develop the habit of seeing goodness, and importantly, learn to communicate our appreciation and love to others.

It is a sobering thought that the finest act
of love you can perform is not an act of
service but an act of contemplation,
of seeing.
When you serve people you help, support,
comfort, alleviate pain.
When you see them in their inner beauty
and goodness you transform and create.
~ Anthony de Mello

My soul tells me
we were all broken from the same nameless heart
and every living thing wakes with a piece of that original heart
aching its way into blossom.
This is why we know each other below our strangeness.
Why when we fall, we lift each other
or when in pain, we hold each other.
Why when sudden with joy, we dance together.
Life is the many pieces of that great heart loving itself back together.
~ Mark Nepo, The Exquisite Risk

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3 Simple Ways to Strengthen Your Relationships

Meditation: The Sea of Awareness (18:08 min.)

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We begin this meditation with awakening to the aliveness in our body, using the imagery of a smile, and a body scan. Then we are guided to sense the vastness of awareness and to rest in that open wakefulness, allowing the changing thoughts, sounds, sensations and feelings to come and go. When we let life be just as it is, we become a sea of awareness that includes all the waves.

Be that sea of awareness… letting the different waves come and go.

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How Mindful Leaders Can Heal Trauma

A Basic Meditation to Tame Your Inner Critic

How to Get Quality Sleep Using Mindfulness

You can’t fall asleep, or maybe you drifted off a couple of hours ago, and now you’re wide awake, feeling lonely and a little desperate.

Lying in the dark, you start to panic: You know your alarm will go off in just a few hours and you’ve barely slept a wink. You need to be alert and ready to tackle the day ahead, and you’re sure that without enough deep, restful sleep, you’ll barely be able to function.

Your worry is well-placed, says Matthew Walker, PhD, professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. He has studied the many ways a lack of sleep affects you. For example, your attention span, mood, and memory suffer. Over time, he suggests, sleeplessness could also lead to unwanted weight gain and negative mood problems. In up to 15% of adults, insomnia causes daytime distress or impairment, with the risk for insomnia being greater in women and older adults.

When it’s happening to you, there’s little consolation in knowing that inadequate sleep, or insomnia, is a problem shared by some 50% of all adults, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. That means nearly half of us have trouble falling asleep and staying asleep, wake up too early, or wake feeling unrefreshed even when we’ve had plenty of time and opportunity to rest. 

Quality Over Quantity

What does a night of sleeping really well look like? According to the National Sleep Foundation, people who experience quality sleep spend at least 85% of their total time in bed asleep, are asleep within 30 minutes of going to bed, only wake once per night, and remain awake for less than 20 minutes before falling back to sleep.

The National Sleep Foundation notes that most adults from age 18 to 64 can aim for seven to nine hours of shut-eye each night, with adults over 64 needing slightly less. For teenagers age 14 to 17, getting eight to ten hours is recommended. However, the quality of sleep may be more important than the quantity, say experts. Deep, uninterrupted sleep is restorative to the whole body: It’s when our brains process what we’ve learned during the day, storing information and memories. Sleep also lowers your pulse and blood pressure, letting the heart and blood vessels rest. Our mental health, immunity, hormonal balance, and metabolism all rely on getting sufficient, high-quality sleep. 

If you don’t meet those ideal sleep targets and tend to wake up under-rested, mindfulness could help you. 

“Strengthening your ‘mind muscle’ through daily practice helps you better recognize the negative insomnia-inducing thoughts and let them pass.”

“Mindfulness can quiet the brain and allows for deeper sleep,” says Shelby Harris, PhD, a clinical sleep psychologist in private practice in Westchester, NY. One of the biggest problems her clients share is dreading the night as it comes and growing anxious about trying to make themselves get sleepy. They worry, she says, that they “won’t be able to do X, Y, Z the next day” if they don’t sleep. “That thought process makes you stressed, worrying—often unnecessarily—about the next day’s effects. That cycle worsens sleep,” says Harris.

Mindfulness can set the stage for sleep by allowing you to be more aware of your thoughts and to be able to let go of those anxieties instead of getting stuck on them, says Harris. “Strengthening your ‘mind muscle’ through daily practice helps you better recognize the negative insomnia-inducing thoughts and let them pass.”

Mind Soother 

Not only does it prepare your mind for drifting off to sleep, mindfulness meditation can also significantly improve sleep quality, says Heather L. Rusch, PhD candidate and research fellow at the National Institute of Nursing Research, National Institutes of Health. She reviewed 20 studies that evaluated the effect of mindfulness meditation on sleep quality and published her findings in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences in 2018.

Mindfulness, Rusch learned, beat standard insomnia treatments, such as suggestions for improving sleep hygiene (eschewing TV and other screens before bedtime is a prime one). And the benefit continued “both immediately after treatment as well as 5 to 12 months later,” she says.

However, because mindfulness is a relatively new concept in insomnia research, we don’t yet know how long you need to practice before achieving better sleep. “We simply don’t have that information yet,” says Harris. 

“What is key is that you practice mindfulness long enough to become aware of the thought processes you have that may get in the way of your sleeping,” says Harris. “Your daily routine practice can be short or long—it really varies! What’s important is the ability to be aware of your thoughts.” →

Unexpected Benefit?

A surprising new finding about what happens in the brains of people who have chronic insomnia was revealed in a 2019 study by sleep expert Jason C. Ong, PhD, associate professor of neurology (Sleep Medicine), Northwestern Medicine, Feinberg School of Medicine.

Setting out to learn about the potential effects of mindfulness meditation on brain activity while people sleep, Ong discovered that after participating in an eight-week mindfulness course, people experienced an increase in brain activity that is usually linked to disturbed sleep. But the participants reported that their sleep during the study had improved. 

“We are still trying to understand this paradoxical finding, but one interpretation is that mindfulness actually stimulates the brain during sleep without the anxiety or negative emotions that typically come with insomnia,” Ong tells Mindful. Mindfulness can boost sleep quality, Ong continues, because it helps you feel kindness toward yourself and let go of habitual rumination—including the worry that your life will fall apart if you don’t get a prescribed amount of sleep.

Dos & Don’ts for Quality Sleep

If disturbed sleep is becoming your new normal, you need a reliable way out. Preferably a natural one, like mindfulness, because sleeping pills can be “blunt instruments that do not produce naturalistic sleep,” says Walker. 

Maintaining a regular, daytime mindfulness meditation practice will help you sleep better and longer at night. However, it’s best not to think of it as a panacea if you wake up at 3 am. In this case, you might try a body scan while in bed, to relax any tension you may be holding in your body. 

Maintaining a regular, daytime mindfulness meditation practice will help you sleep better and longer at night.

And if sleep still doesn’t arrive, you can do a mindfulness practice, but get out of bed and do it elsewhere. Staying awake in bed for longer than about 20 minutes creates an association that the bed is for other activities as well as sleep, says Harris. The point isn’t to fall asleep in the midst of your practice, but afterward when you return to bed.

Another expert tip: Don’t rely on those ubiquitous sleep apps. “A lot of people use them as a sedative, but that’s not ideal,” says Harris. “You shouldn’t need to rely on anything to fall asleep—what happens if one day your phone is out of juice or the app doesn’t work?”

When you need help drifting off in the wee hours, don’t try to force it. As every insomnia sufferer knows, the more you lie there trying to make yourself sleep, the more it won’t happen. Notice your worries about being unable to sleep, your noisy mind, and visualize them floating by. The more you do this and accept that you cannot force sleep, the easier sleep will come. 

Finally, don’t watch the clock. Trying to calculate how many hours you’ve been awake, or how many more hours you have left to sleep, only worsens insomnia, notes Harris. Set an alarm for your wake time and don’t look at it until it goes off in the morning.

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Learning the Light Touch of Allowing

When I first started meditating, I was anxious and fidgety. I wanted to crawl out of my skin. I’m truly astounded that I didn’t quit, since I was 17 at the time and had quit all sorts of things in those days—and they were mostly things that were good for me. Things that weren’t good for me, I just kept on doing. But somehow I did keep going with meditation. Maybe it had something to do with peer pressure or pride, or just the notion of how silly it would be to chuck the whole thing aside because I couldn’t pay attention to my breath without going just a little bit crazy. Also, meditating confirmed that you were not part of the mainstream, and not being mainstream was a part of my thing back then (#sixties, which didn’t end till the middle of the seventies).

Stick-to-it-iveness, or stubbornness, or whatever it was, paid off, because meditation soon became a regular and important part of my life. A lot of the agitation died down (although it’s still there in a big way at times) and I began to sense a backdrop of well-being that lay behind all experiences. Nice.

And yet, this chill quality started to be married to ambition, trying to become a good meditator, hell, a great meditator. I filled my head with fantasies of how wise and measured I would be, maybe even holy, but certainly someone whom people would look upon as a sage, the one who is the calm center in the midst of the storm. In terms of my actual demeanor and behavior, this was far from the case, as anyone who knew me in my early days will tell you. 

There’s an inner being inside us all, it seems, who wants to take the path of least resistance, avoid doing the dirty work, and be lauded nonetheless. I’ll call him Frank (with apologies to all the Franks out there). Frank makes a big mess. When inner Frank takes over, it’s as if a wild boar got drunk and imagined he could safely interact with humans in polite society. Frank thinks he’s so suave and debonair, but he’s thinking only of himself, and he’s therefore oafish and inconsiderate of others—like the “Two Wild and Crazy Guys” in the Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd Saturday Night Live skit. (Check it out on YouTube if you haven’t seen it or it’s faded from memory.) When that ambitious lout inside of me took hold, I feel pretty certain I became arrogant, clumsy, and at times intolerable.

Eventually, though, like the skin-crawling agitation that dominated my early forays into meditation, the self-importance and ambition started to lessen and weaken. It became not only tedious to others but tedious to me. And yes, like the agitation, it could rear its ugly head at any time, probably even as recently as yesterday, but all in all, trying to win the meditation Olympic Gold Medal has been much less of a feature of what you might call my meditation “career.”

What became a bigger feature is a seemingly insatiable curiosity about why I (and we, I suppose) cling so tightly to the notion that things ought not to change, that they should stay just like they are, that the status quo ante (i.e., how things have been) is the best status of all. We adhere to this belief and desire in spite of massive evidence to the contrary every single day, if not every minute, of our lives. Staying the same is not what’s going on here. 

Flux is the thing.

And yet, I find, I still expect things not to change, many decades into my examination of this intractable habit. There are explanations having to do with the fact that it can be a helpful mental shortcut to expect things to stay the same: to believe that there will be a floor under our feet when we swing out of bed in the morning; that when the light turns green, people will go; that my baseball team will once again not go to the World Series and that my wife will mock me for giving a damn about that. Indeed, there are common-sense reasons for what psychologists call our status quo bias, and yet in the context of figuring out the ways we cause ourselves pain, putting forth reasons for relying on things staying the same really amounts to no more than making excuses, in my mind, for our deep clinging to the familiar, our allegiance to permanence, our fear of change.

Interrupting the momentum of our discomfort with change in the small things can, over time, subtly alter our perception of the big things. In some ways, this is indeed at the heart of mindfulness.

Somewhere along the way, though, the why part of this quest started to recede into the background. It seemed a waste of time to keep trying to resolve a conundrum that eluded me for as long as some middle-aged people have lived. A better approach might be to take it for granted and see what could be done to undercut and confound it.

Some people call this allowing practice, just letting things be, and in my experience, there can be a number of allowing practices. The trick, though, is for the allowing practices to not be about a begrudging allowance, à la “OK, things change. I get it. So, can we get on with the familiar, already?” Calling these “practices” makes it a bit fancy, I admit. They are simply reflections in the midst of life: taking the opportunities presented to us to acclimate to the big, beautiful, changing scene that life serves up.

Since these nine reflections focus on the minutiae of life, things that might even normally be beneath notice, one could argue that they’re not that relevant to the kinds of change that deeply bother us: losing or not getting a job, having our hopes dashed, the death of friends and family, the fact that we will die. 

Fair point. These big life events are the emotional touch points where our difficulty with change—our feeling of time passing, that everything moves on and slips through our fingers—makes itself most acutely felt. For that very reason, though, these are hard to tackle head-on. Interrupting the momentum of our discomfort with change in the small things can, over time, subtly alter our perception of the big things. In some ways, this is indeed at the heart of mindfulness: When we rest patiently, with no goal, aim, or destination for a while, we turn a microscope on the shifting landscape that emerges anew with each passing moment. 

1. Plant Life

If you take a close look at plastic flowers and then compare them to living flowers, what’s the salient difference? It’s that the living flowers are also dying flowers. The very fact that they have a life span and you can see that change before your eyes is key to their beauty. When you can, take a little time to observe the fragility of a flower. Even a silk flower fades in the sunlight and a plastic flower will eventually become brittle.

2. Seasons

Some places have four very distinct seasons. In other places, the seasonal change is subtler, but no place on Earth is without seasonal changes in temperature, light, precipitation, plant life—providing an excellent opportunity to revel in the changes. One Japanese approach to nature and food even divides the year into 72 micro-seasons, of about five days each. (And yes, there is an app for that.) 

Next to my desk is a wide, tall window, and I make sure to look out from it each day and check out the seasonal change. In early spring, the branches are bare, in midspring they are spare, by late spring and summer, they hang down from the weight of leaves, blossoms, and seeds. In autumn, they are colorful. In winter, they are skeletal.

3. Light

For years, my brother lived on the side of a mountain. When I would visit him, I used to love to sit on his porch as late afternoon gave way to evening and nighttime. We tend to think of the color of something we see as fixed, but it is not. Colors change all the time in relation to light. In bright light, the trees on my brother’s mountain are mostly bright green. As the light fades, they are dark green, and then black, no more than a silhouette. Are we not just the same, not one color, but many colors? 

4. Temperature

We live in an age when we are necessarily concerned with temperature. Global warming is a temperature event that concerns us all, and contemplating that means allowing for a lot of uncertainty and sadness about the future—the solastalgia that the naturalist and meditation teacher Mark Coleman referred to in his piece in the April 2019 issue of Mindful. There is no real way around that shared wound. Allowing does not mean negating what is painful. It is allowing what is there to simply be there.  

Allowing does not mean negating what is painful. It is allowing what is there to simply be  there.  

We’re also obsessed with temperature, our Goldilocks yearning for the perfect temperature condition, reinforced by our massively managed climate control systems that attempt to keep us all in our happy place (ironically, a big contributor to global warming). I like to observe when I’m clinging hard to an ideal temperature, or season, and see if I can allow myself to be a person “for all seasons.” When it’s cold, it’s cold. When it’s hot, it’s hot. Cheerleading for one or the other, as our media meteorologists do incessantly, is forever asking us to be somewhere other than where we are.

5. Travel

Travel is about changing locations. Throughout human history, we’ve sought faster and faster ways to change location. In our science fiction, we love the idea of teletransportation—to be somewhere else in the blink of an eye. Get there fast and park as close as you can to the entrance.

I have to travel a fair amount for my work, to meet people doing cool things in cool places. In the past few years, I’ve done a few things to try to notice the speed of travel and to appreciate where I am more and how I’m moving from place to place. I try now to figure out how an airport is actually laid out rather than being lost in a maze like a rat in a Skinner box. In a city, I take out a paper map and spread it on my bed and study it, so I have an overview (particularly since GPS systems appear to be eroding our powers of spatial and situational awareness). I try to be where I am as completely, not simply on my way to somewhere else: John P. Milton, the founder of vision questing, said, “Sky above, earth below”; or “Wherever you go, there you are,” made popular by Jon Kabat-Zinn, and attributed to both Confucius and Buckaroo Banzai. 

Moving more slowly helps, including walking and bicycling. Instead of zipping around from place to place in a cab or a ride-share, I try public transportation when I can. There is more waiting. And during that waiting, while I am impatient, I can allow myself to be impatient, and observe it rise and fall. It’s almost like going to the movies. And like the movies, you’re together in a room with your fellow human beings. This room moves, though.

6. Time

Time bends and flexes and floats. We’ve become so accustomed to thinking of time as being measured only by the clock that we may not notice so much all the other rhythms in life that “keep time” like a metronome. A heartbeat. The path of the sun through the sky. The seasons. Even our attention: When bored, a minute drags; when engaged, a minute flies. Is a minute, then, a fixed thing? Take time to notice the ways that time is influenced, by how fast someone talks, by how much they pay attention to you, by whether we have chosen to be someplace or would rather be somewhere else. Take your time. Even with the mundane, especially with the mundane. Why rush through the dishes? Does barreling through the tedium to get to the other side really make us happier? Appreciate timing as much as time.

7. Changing Your Mind

Changing your mind gets a very bad rap. Don’t succumb to that tyranny! Go ahead, let your mind change. Let it go where it will. A changing mind is a beautiful mind. As long as you don’t create too much chaos for other people, admitting that your mind has changed can be humbling. 

8. Passing Interests and Abilities

My daughter seems to have a new hobby every six months or so, and she gets pretty good at them, and some of them stick for longer. Years ago I obsessed about opera. Today, it’s an occasional thing. I once played a lot of golf and was pretty good. Now, not so much. Interests wax and wane. What was the thing is no longer the thing. There are fashions. Hula hoops, yo-yos, roller rinks, mood rings. Yes, that’s fickle, but this fickleness is something to be honest about. Everything has a first blush, a honeymoon, a plateau…and an eventual death. Even our greatest passions.

9. Aging

And speaking of death, we are all dying. We are aging, in every minute. Over time, our capacities decrease. No matter how hard we work at it, eventually we will be able to do less, we will likely be in more pain, we will see more pain, we will have lost more people, we will face a diagnosis, a tragic loss. 

Why not make friends with change, with allowing, every day? When the big changes come, they will not seem so big. We may well have embraced change that much.

Why not make friends with change, with allowing, every day?

In this continual process of allowing, I cannot say how much I have loosened my clinging to wanting things to remain. I cannot say I am eager to die, or to lose my friends, or to have good times turn to hard times. No, I continue to cling. I have pretty much given up trying to figure out why. Just human, I guess.

And yet here, as in so many things in life, there is a paradox: In my very acceptance of the fact that I don’t accept impermanence, I find some peace. And I allow it to be there, like dew hanging off the tip of a leaf, glinting in the early morning sun. The early morning sun will burn off the dew. By night the leaf will be a dark silhouette and eventually unseen. So be it. 

A Practice to Welcome Everything

by Frank Ostaseski

To welcome something doesn’t mean we have to like it, and it doesn’t mean we have to agree with it; it just means we have to be willing to meet it. We temporarily suspend our rush to judgment and are simply open to what’s occurring.

With welcoming comes the ability to work with what is present and what is unpleasant. After a while, we begin to discover that our happiness isn’t determined simply by what is external in our life but also what is internal.

To be open means to embrace paradox and contradiction; it’s about keeping our minds and hearts available to new information, letting ourselves be informed by life. Openness welcomes the good times and the bad times as equally valid experiences. 

Openness is the basis of a skillful response to life.

At the deepest level, this is an invitation to fearless receptivity. To welcome everything and push away nothing can’t be done as an act of will. This is an act of love.

Mostly, we think of mindfulness as bringing a very precise attention to what’s happening, as it’s happening. In this way, we bring an almost laser-like attention to our practice. We bring a careful moment-to-moment attention to sensation, to thoughts, to emotions. But sometimes this kind of precise attention can create a sort of tension or struggle in the mind. This is when it’s more useful to try a practice that cultivates an open, boundless awareness. To develop a mind that is vast like space. To allow pleasant and unpleasant experiences to appear and disappear without struggle, resistance, or harm. 

So, let’s try this practice for welcoming everything and pushing away nothing.

Settle back into your seat, relax, and come into the breath and body. Maybe let your eyes close if that feels comfortable for you. Let your breathing be very natural.

Begin by being aware of the various sensations in your body: pressure, movement, tingling, the feel of the air on your hands and face. Just feel the waves of sensation.

Now, let go of the idea of arms and legs and a body. Become aware of the area above your head. How far does that space extend? Let your awareness sense what’s to the left of you. What’s to the right of you? Let your awareness come into the area below your body. Is there any vibration in your feet or the floor? Let your awareness extend to the area behind your body, so it fills the whole room. Let your awareness be aware of what’s in front of the body, extending out as far as it possibly can, so that there’s this sense of openness, of boundless space; and all of the activities of body, heart, and mind are appearing and disappearing in that open, welcoming space.

Allow all experience to arise without any interference— no inside, no outside. Relax your ownership of thoughts. Look and see the difference between being lost in thought and being mindful of thought. It’s like when a sound occurs in the room, or a bird flies by, you just notice the sound of the bird; you don’t think it’s you. Let it be that way with your thoughts and sensations, everything coming, everything going in a vast, open space. It can be helpful to think about what happens when you walk into a room: Most people see the chairs or tables or the objects in the room and fail to see the space.

Let yourself be aware of the space surrounding all the activity, all the coming and going. Remember, whatever we can give space to can move. Keep allowing all the thoughts, all the sensations, all the feelings to rise and disappear in the vast spaciousness, like clouds in the sky.

Finally, let your attention come to the awareness itself, vast, transparent, clear, not disturbed by anything that’s coming and going. Welcome everything, push away nothing.

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Why You Shouldn’t Suppress Your Emotions

Our emotions are elusive, shape-shifting inner beasts, but despite the challenge of pinning any of them down in precise terms—what is anger, really?—we don’t doubt they’re part of our makeup. We don’t think of an emotionless human being as a good thing.

Yet there is little evidence that emotions were treated with respect throughout much of history. Words that point to emotions in ancient languages are tinged with notions of irrationality or possession by spirits. In the West especially, it seems, emotions were considered irrational. Fortunately, artists came along with an interest in the actual psychological makeup of individuals—the full catastrophe, as it were. During the Renaissance, there was a concerted effort to represent affetti (movements of the soul) in the faces and gestures of the people depicted in works of art. The artists, most prominently Leonardo da Vinci, wanted to portray how people were actually feeling.

Whereas these artists were exploring rich movements of the mind and heart from the outside in, mindfulness meditation gives us the opportunity to explore from the inside out. In basic mindfulness practice, we’re instructed to simply notice our thoughts and come back to the anchor of our attention (most often the breath). As we become more accustomed to noticing and coming back, we become familiar with the quality and texture of our thoughts. Before we’ve decided a thought is bad or good or otherwise, we have a split second to just see it for what it is, as if we were in a creative writing class focusing simply on what we see, not what we think or feel or about it.

When we do that, we definitely notice that some thoughts contain emotional content, and that these emotional “thoughts” arrive as an experience in our body, not just our brain. If you’re angry, you may clench your teeth. If you’re indifferent, your whole body may shrug. If elated, you may shriek. And so on and so on.

This wondrous array of responses is part of what’s beautiful about being human. The longstanding diminishment of emotions as anti-rational has cramped our style.

This wondrous array of responses is part of what’s beautiful about being human. The longstanding diminishment of emotions as anti-rational has cramped our style. It’s such a shame when we judge emotions as wrong or bad. We’re told that being angry is always a bad thing, that we must calm down and stop being so emotional.

This approach often creates a push-pull with these powerful forces of the soul: We suppress emotions until we can’t take it anymore, then we indulge in them. We keep a lid on our anger till we explode. We pretend we’re absorbed by something that leaves us cold, only to grumble and dissemble in private. Or perhaps we deny our passion, and suffer in silent self-pity or clumsily and fearfully convert our love into possessiveness in an effort to maintain control.

Emotions can and do get out of control and, in fact, take charge, and make no mistake about it, when they are out of control they can do tremendous damage! In situations where real harm can result, emotions are not to be treated lightly. In the end, though, it’s much easier for emotions to control us if we fear them, if we feel something is horribly wrong with having them, and if we believe that reason must always prevail and executive function must take control.

Mindfulness practice, thankfully, gives us a chance to live the whole experience of an emotion—its flavor, its texture, how it lives in our body. And after we have done so over and over again, like a well-practiced fiddle player we can learn to play, not struggle, with emotions. Our strings are tuned, and we play them with precision and abandon.

Will mistakes be made?

Yes.

Can we learn from an emotion gone wild, clean up the mess and the damage, and move on? 

We can. 

Emotions are a renewable resource. They’re beasts to ride on and revel in, not to lock up because they can become unruly at times.

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Three Breath Meditations to Connect to Your Best Self

Six Books to Enjoy this Fall

Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives

Jane Brox • Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

An author fascinated by the fundamental aspects of life, Jane Brox has written about family, farmland, and light—all to great acclaim. She is a micro-historian with a farmer’s feel for the value of getting dirt under your fingernails to get to the heart of the matter. Using the modern technique of alternating and intertwining stories, Brox reports on silence as a means of reform in early penitentiaries (thought to be more humane than corporal or capital punishment) and as a means of spiritual development in the monastery.

Silence as means of redemption for criminals is largely a story of the dark side of silence. The prohibition against speaking revealed a deep need to give voice and to commune with others. It was being silenced rather than finding peace within silence: punishment, not reformation. 

Brox leaves us to contemplate the interplay between quiet and community, between a silence born of deep listening and one born of wanting others to shut up.

The dark side is also explored in chapters on the silencing of women’s voices. English law, brought to the early American colonies, meted out punishment to women for “talking too much or too publicly, or in a tone of voice that seemed grating or nagging,” Brox writes, sharing the English legal definition of a scold: “a troublesome angry woman who, by her brawling and wrangling among her neighbors, doth break the public peace and beget, cherish, and increase public discord.” 

When Brox turns her historical lens to spiritual silence, we find the key difference between silencing and reveling in silence is community. Monastic orders live together in intimate communion. Only rarely are monastics cut off from others completely, and usually only for defined periods.

Having juxtaposed silence in two very different forms, Brox leaves us to contemplate the interplay between quiet and community, between a silence born of deep listening and one born of wanting others to shut up.

A Walking Life: Reclaiming Our Health and Our Freedom—One Step at a Time

Antonia Malchik • Da Capo Press

It’s undeniable that the ability to walk upright has shaped our species. Not just what we can do and where we can go, but what our interactions look like, how we exercise our autonomy, what we need to develop and thrive in every aspect of our being. In A Walking Life, Malchik looks at these factors and more, showing the significance of walking at various historical moments—and arguing that what it really means to “walk” also includes people with illness or disabilities who have devised countless ways to move through the world. She’ll make you pause over many current lifestyles that, alarmingly, involve precious little time on our feet. 

Change Your World: The Science of Resilience and the True Path to Success

Michael Ungar • Sutherland House

Social worker, family therapist, and Canada Research Chair in Child, Family, and Community Resilience, Michael Ungar knows whereof he speaks when it comes to how important environment is to health and well-being. How resilient will you be if you’re hungry, poorly educated, and have little access to good employment? And self-help drives him crazy: It makes people think there’s something wrong with their brain that they must fix. He makes a great point. What’s a little puzzling is why Ungar thinks mindfulness practice has nothing to do with seeing what needs to be changed in “your world.” In his view, mindfulness is an unproven way to trying to fix ourselves instead of our environment, and those of us who love it should give it up. Perhaps, though, if this is the impression we’re leaving, we need to up our game.

The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities through Mindfulness

Rhonda V. Magee • Tarcher Perigree

Early in this book, Rhonda Magee tells a little story that both breaks your heart and potently illustrates why she has devoted her life’s work to getting to the heart of bias and helping undo its deleterious effects. She recounts the first time she came to see fully how other people could view her in a completely different light than she and her family viewed her. She saw that there was a wall dividing people—a wall that could be nearly invisible until you bumped up against it. 

Magee has brought together experience as a law professor and a longtime practitioner of mindfulness—and training as a mindfulness teacher—to host classroom conversations about race, privilege, and bias that few of us ever take part in, particularly in a mixed-race context. She’s learned a lot from years of this kind of hands-on work. For one thing, it has taught Magee that color blindness is an unhelpful concept for promoting equity and justice. Despite the fact that race is “socially constructed” and ultimately a “fiction,” our perception of significant differences is unmistakable, so we cannot be “blind” to color. That’s simply a prescription for being blind to our biases.

Instead, Magee teaches and practices what she calls ColorInsight, using contemplative practices to peer into and beyond our biases. It starts from a view that we are deeply interconnected, but need to “take a long (lifelong), loving (heartful and compassionate) look at racism,” where “staying in our discomfort” can be “an important part of healing and transformation.” Through instruction, stories, history (both legal and otherwise), and insight, Magee takes us on a very rewarding, vital, and timely journey. 

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

Jenny Odell • Melville House

In her debut book, Jenny Odell puts forward an uncommonly rich, poetic ode to the here-and-now, and a call to find belonging in it. While she critiques both “productivity-obsessed culture” and addictive tech—Odell grew up in Silicon Valley—her argument surpasses a mere list of reasons to turn off your phone. She looks to (for example) literature, art, working-class and Native American histories, experimental music, and her own experience (as an artist, art educator, and birdwatcher in the Bay Area) to illustrate the true vibrancy and potency of human attention. Naming attention as our primary resource to combat looming social and ecological catastrophe, she paints a compelling picture of why it’s urgent that we return to a sense of public, embodied space and time. “A simple refusal motivates my argument: refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough,” writes Odell. It’s hard not to see the inherent mindfulness of that refusal.

The Poetry Remedy: Prescriptions for the Heart, Mind, and Soul

William Sieghart • Viking Press

“Leaning in” is a phrase often used by meditation teachers to describe staying with and exploring our discomfort, rather than warding it off with a mental 10-foot pole. In this “poetic dispensary,” Sieghart presents a similarly time-tested way to lean in: through poetry. To find that someone far away has already written a poem that expresses the intensity of our own experience, he says, “is to discover a powerful sense of complicity, and that precious realization: I’m not the only one who feels like this.” 

The table of contents is a list of difficulties such as Anxiety, Letting Go, Stagnation, or Rocky Relationships. Under each is a poem that speaks to it, as well as Sieghart’s gentle, perspective-giving commentary. Of course, not everyone who feels X emotion will find comfort in the same words. Still, even if you don’t usually fancy poems, you might lean in to these ones and be surprised by the balm they offer.

Podcasts

TED Talks Daily

Episode: “Ella Al-Shamahi: The Fascinating (and Dangerous) Places Scientists Aren’t Exploring”

Delving into our species’ ancient history may let us understand each other more deeply. But what if vital archaeological evidence exists in a no-fly zone? According to Ella Al-Shamahi, an English paleoanthropologist of Arab heritage, science suffers from “a geography problem.” Through the lens of her ordeal in reaching the Yemeni island of Socotra—where she and her team aim to research some of the earliest Homo sapiens to leave present-day Africa—Al-Shamahi talks about the institutional barriers that often prevent Western researchers from studying in regions deemed politically unstable. Some of these places, nevertheless, offer a great deal to learn about the climate crisis, extinction, and the human journey. Instead of having to completely avoid the unknown, she says, scientists can take measures to greatly mitigate risk when they’re on foreign soil. And by strengthening scientific collaboration across borders, she adds, it becomes more feasible to focus on what we globally share, rather than what seems to divide us.   

On the Media

Episode: “Uncomfortably Numb” 

Journalist and media analyst Brooke Gladstone talks with experts about a few current events and questions some of the ways we’re seeking to protect ourselves from grief, helplessness, and fear. First up: By constructing an alternate (if totally out-there) version of reality, conspiracy theorists believe they know the world better than the rest of us. Ironically, for them, their “fantasies” lend “a sense of order” to the chaos. Meanwhile, many climate scientists struggle with being on the front lines of comprehending climate change. Even more than non-scientists, their mental health can suffer from the gravity of what’s happening to the planet. Then, there’s the “Brexit anxiety” that nearly two-thirds of Brits are feeling, and a problem doctors tend to treat as an individual medical issue—never mind that it’s a natural response to the tense political environment. Gladstone ends on the idea that we can counteract numbness by claiming space for ourselves to simply be. It’s in claiming these pockets of freedom that we may discover cracks for the light of change to seep in.  (See also How to Do Nothing, reviewed on page 74). 

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Restorative Breathing is the Key To Vitality

The story in my family is that a coat hanger saved my life.

I was about 18 months old and was suffering with a horrible case of pneumonia that made it difficult for me to breathe. One night I was struggling so badly, my father called our family doctor and pleaded with her to make a house call. When she arrived, or so the tale goes, she took one look at me, grabbed a wire hanger from the closet, and performed an emergency tracheotomy on the spot.

Everything turned out fine, and within a few weeks I was up and crawling again, but what lingered for years was a feeling of vulnerability—and an ambivalent relationship to breathing—that has shadowed me throughout my life. I was hospitalized again with pneumonia in my teens, and even as an adult I sometimes struggled to exhale or mysteriously stopped breathing altogether. I started meditating years later and listened to teachers rhapsodize about following the breath, which was my idea of hell. I danced around it, focusing on noting thoughts or experiencing bodily sensations—anything except following the breath. But you can only hide from your breath for so long. Eventually, I would have to address the problem head-on. If breathing is the gateway to a happy and peaceful life, as many meditation teachers claim, how could I continue to ignore it?

So, I reached out to Belisa Vranich, the author of Breathe, a classic book on the mechanics of breathing. Vranich, a psychologist who runs a learning program called The Breathing Class, got interested in breathing when she started practicing in New York City and found that many of her patients were so agitated they couldn’t take in anything that she had to say. But when she started looking for some simple breathing techniques to teach them, she found that, even though everyone agreed that breathing was important, the majority of people—including many experts—were doing it all wrong. 

Based on her research, Vranich estimates that at least nine out of every 10 people aren’t using their diaphragms as a primary breathing muscle. Instead, they’re breathing vertically, lifting their shoulders and sucking in their guts on the inhale, as if they were striking a Superman pose. “That’s anatomically incongruous,” she said. “There’s no other animal on the planet that breathes like this. We’re taking this beautiful machine and using it in a way that makes no sense based on how it was designed.” 

“There’s no other animal on the planet that breathes like this. We’re taking this beautiful machine and using it in a way that makes no sense based on how it was designed.” 

Breathing up and down, instead of out and in, disengages the diaphragm and makes it difficult to take a full breath. It also triggers a shift in the autonomic nervous system, which is made up of two counterbalancing parts: the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic system usually kicks in when we’re facing danger or are under a great deal of stress (a.k.a. the “fight or flight” response). In ordinary circumstances, once the initial threat diminishes, the parasympathetic system will step in and set in motion the “rest and digest, restore and repair” functions. But if you’re constantly breathing with your neck and shoulders, it signals the vagus nerve—our internal stress detector—to send a message to the brain that the body is on overload

As a result, many of us spend a good part of our day in low to high fight-or-flight mode. That can play havoc with our nervous system, our digestion, our blood pressure—not to mention our ability to get a good night’s sleep.

The key to preventing this from happening, according to Vranich, is to learn to breathe the way we were designed—horizontally, expanding the belly outward on the inhale and narrowing it on the exhale, which engages the diaphragm and other breathing muscles in the process. The most common breathing techniques focus on counting breaths and inhaling and exhaling according to fixed patterns. There’s nothing wrong with that, said Vranich, “but most people don’t have much success doing that because their diaphragms are in spasm. They’ve been bracing so long their diaphragms don’t stretch anymore. So, I show them how to unlock their diaphragms and they start feeling better immediately.”

The Mechanics of the Breath

To help me understand and get things rolling, Vranich invited me to take a private class with Alyson Khan, one of her senior teachers in Los Angeles. Khan, a cheerful woman in her thirties, watched me take a few breaths and concluded that I had a strong horizontal inhale but an iffy exhale. “You must be bracing somewhere,” she said.

“Bracing” was one of Alyson’s favorite words. In fact, learning to use mindfulness to manage her bracing habit was a key turning point for her. It all started in grade school when her classmates started calling her “Fatty” even though she wasn’t overweight. And soon sucking it in became second nature. “We live in a culture of gut-suckers,” she quipped. “What do we do when we walk into a room? We lift our chest up, throw our shoulders back, and suck our gut in, because, God forbid, you don’t want to look chubby.  In LA, they might even write you a ticket for that.”

 Now she finds she often braces when she’s racing to beat a traffic light or navigating a tense social situation or spotting a text from someone she’s trying to avoid. “Bracing is the body’s natural way of protecting itself,” she said. “If you’re not aware of that, you’re going to carry that stress in your body throughout the day, and it will affect how you relate to others.” It wasn’t until she started paying attention to her breathing that things began to change. The key, she said, was being attuned to when she was on the verge of bracing and then asking herself, “Do I really want to be doing that all day?”

Next, Alyson showed me how to calculate my Breathing Intelligence Quotient (or BIQ for short), a tool Vranich developed to measure what she calls your “vital lung capacity.” It involves using a measuring tape to determine the expanse of your ribs when you inhale compared with when you exhale. In my case, the difference was two inches (40-inch inhale/38-inch exhale). That translated into 52% capacity, or a letter grade of D. I was crestfallen, but Alyson reassured me, saying most of her students “fail miserably on their first try, so you must be doing something right.”

When you look at anatomy charts in a doctor’s office, the diaphragm is usually portrayed as a thin red line, but it’s the biggest breathing muscle in your body.

Then she said, “Do you want to see what your diaphragm looks like?” and pulled out a vegetable steamer basket—the kind with flaps that expand and contract. I was flabbergasted. When you look at anatomy charts in a doctor’s office, the diaphragm is usually portrayed as a thin red line, but it’s the biggest breathing muscle in your body, about the size of a small pizza, and it will expand four or five inches when you inhale (if you let it) and shrink back into place when you exhale. “The digestive organs are right below the diaphragm and they get really happy when you’re breathing the way you’re supposed to breathe,” Alyson said. “And so does your heart. Everything gets really happy, and if you do it long enough, your body will remember and want to breathe that way all the time.”

To bring my sorry diaphragm back to life, Alyson put me through an exhausting series of exercises, including Rock ‘n’ Roll (shifting back and forth between powerful belly breaths and crunching exhales while seated), Diaphragm Extensions (lying with my back on the floor and lifting a 20-lb. weight up and down with my belly muscles), and Exhale Pulsations (exhaling rapidly as if blowing out a candle 40 or 50 times). By the end, I felt bone weary, but strangely exhilarated. My lips, fingers, and toes were tingling, and the buzz lasted for hours. I don’t think my cells had ever been bathed in that much oxygen before.

Just before I left, Alyson had me do another BIQ reading. This time the gap was 2.75 inches, which translated into 72%, or a strong C+.

Maybe there was still hope.

My Breathing Regimen

The next day Dr. Vranich and I met on a video call. She was in her apartment in New York City, where she spends most of her time when she isn’t traveling the world teaching firefighters, pregnant women, extreme athletes, and other folks how to get more intimate with their diaphragms. She told me I was a rare specimen: a horizontal inhaler (good) and a vertical exhaler (not so good). She speculated that I’d conditioned myself after the tracheotomy to brace on the exhale and, as result, had a lot of stale CO2 stored in my body. “You’ve never had the muscle memory of a good exhale,” she said, “so we have to teach you a new way of moving your muscles.” 

Her solution was to train me to relax my front abdominal muscles on the exhale and squeeze out the air with my diaphragm, lower abs, intercostals, obliques, and the muscles of my pelvic floor. Essentially, she figured that if I learned to breathe correctly with those muscles, my front abs would start mimicking the movement by association. “Your belly muscles are going to do it because your side muscles are doing it,” she explained.

So, over the next several weeks, Belisa put me through a grueling regimen aimed at strengthening my intercostals (the small muscles attached to the ribs) and my obliques (my side abdominals) and getting them to work in harmony with my other breathing muscles. She also taught me how to tilt my hips forward on the inhale and backward on the exhale to engage my glutes and pelvic floor muscles. “I want you to feel as if you’re being scooped out in the middle and your belly button is getting closer and closer to your spine,” she said.

It was hard mastering this motion, at first. But eventually, after several weeks of daily practice, it started to feel virtually automatic. My breath suddenly became fuller and more relaxed, and, every now and then, I could feel myself slipping into a natural breathing rhythm without even thinking about it. In the beginning, Belisa said my goal should be an 100% BIQ score, and by the end of week four, the readings began to climb into the high 80s.

Breathing for Better Health

A hot topic for breathing researchers lately has been slowness. Recent studies by cardiologist David O’Hare and others have shown that slow-paced breathing can have a positive impact on heart rate variability, a measure of the heart’s ability to adapt to stress. Increasing HRV makes the system more flexible and resilient. That’s why it’s often cited as a predictor of longevity and overall well-being. 

None of these studies surprised Richard Brown, an associate clinical psychiatry professor at Columbia University—and an adept in aikido, qigong, Zen meditation, and other practices—who has spent most of his career studying the benefits of slow breathing. He and his wife, Patricia Gerbarg, an assistant clinical professor at New York Medical College, have developed a program of exercises, detailed in their book The Healing Power of the Breath, which have produced remarkable results in studies of patients with anxiety, depression, insomnia, and other conditions. 

The exercises are based, in large part, on traditional qigong and yogic practices, and the couple’s work with patients over the past 25-plus years. According to Brown, the ancient qigong masters had a deep understanding of how the autonomic nervous system works. As evidence, he cited a treatise in the Tao Te Ching, that “starts out by saying that the purpose of breathing practices is to become like a newborn baby,” which aligns directly with O’Hare’s research on breathing and heart rate variability. The ancient Chinese texts, Brown said, instructed beginning students to learn slow “natural” breathing first, to restore yang to the body, which is related to the parasympathetic nervous system. And once they’d mastered that, they were given fast breathing exercises to generate yin, which parallels the sympathetic system. Then, in the final stage, they returned to slow breathing to integrate and balance the practice.

One of the most startling studies on the effectiveness of slow breathing was done by Italian cardiologist Luciano Bernardi. He had a group of professional mountain climbers practice breathing at a pace of six breaths per minute for one hour a day for a two-year period while they were preparing for a Mount Everest ascent, and then compared their performance with a similar group of elite climbers who didn’t do slow-breathing training. Both groups reached the summit, but the slow-breathing climbers did so without using auxiliary oxygen and averaged about 10 breaths per minute at the end of the climb, while the other climbers resorted to oxygen and finished breathing twice as fast at their counterparts. Another surprising result was that the slow-breathing climbers were able to use 80% of their lungs’ surface during the climb, which is essentially the maximum possible and about four times greater than that of average breathers.

These exercises, taking about 10 minutes total, have been shown to help balance the autonomic stress-response system, relieve anxiety and other symptoms of stress, and improve sleep.

The core of Brown and Gerbarg’s program focuses on three exercises:  1) coherent breathing at a pace of five to six breaths per minute; 2) resistance breathing, characterized by a slight tightening at the back of the throat on the exhale; and 3) moving breathing, an innovative way of using the imagination to circulate energy throughout the body. These exercises, taking about 10 minutes total, have been shown to help balance the autonomic stress-response system, relieve anxiety and other symptoms of stress, and improve sleep. According to Brown, they are particularly effective when combined with an additional 10 minutes of movement and meditation.

Brown and Gerbarg have spent a good deal of time over the past two decades teaching breathing exercises to survivors of mass disasters, including the 9/11 World Trade Center attack, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and the Sudan and Rwanda genocides. One of the studies they did after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami showed that slow-breathing practices dramatically reduced symptoms of PTSD and depression—in a matter of days, in some cases. 

“What trauma does is disrupt the healthy balance of different parts of our nervous system, which are meant to work together,” said Brown. “When people have to strive to survive, their stress response becomes overactive and the soothing part of the system declines. But we’ve found that you can bring it back into balance by shifting the way you breathe. More research needs to be done on this, but our feeling is that breathing breaks the link between negative emotions and the memory of events. It kind of washes away the stored pattern of the incident and reformats your cerebral cortex.”

A moving example is the story of Sonya, an office worker who was miraculously rescued from the World Trade Center. She’d been working in the towers during the previous attack in 1993, so she didn’t hesitate when the first plane crashed into her building on 9/11. She got up from her desk on the 80th floor and started running down the stairs in high heels as fast as she could. Halfway down the stairwell, she collapsed from exhaustion, but two men carried her the rest of the way, in total darkness except for the faint glow of a distant policeman’s flashlight. Twenty seconds after they escaped, the building collapsed. 

Afterward, Sonya developed PTSD and was constantly haunted by anxiety, nightmares, and unbearable feelings of distress. She tried conventional treatment, medication, and some alternative approaches, including resistance breathing. But nothing seemed to work. Finally, seven years later, she signed up for one of Brown’s and Gerbarg’s workshops and made an impressive recovery. At the end of the weekend, she revealed this was the first time since the tragedy that she felt as if she’d gotten her life back.

Making Friends with the Breath

My experience was somewhat less dramatic. But I spent a few weeks practicing Brown and Gerbarg’s exercises, using the CD included with their book, and was impressed by the calming and energizing effect the techniques had on me. I think it helped that I had done Vranich’s intense workouts and had a greater command of my breathing muscles. At one point, I was so immersed in the long five-breaths-per-minute sequence that I lost the self-consciousness I’d often experienced meditating, and let myself surf along with the breath. The years I’d spent terrified of my breathing suddenly faded into memory.

A few weeks later, I did my last BIQ reading with Dr. Vranich. It seemed almost anticlimactic, given everything we’d been through, but the tale of the tape was indisputable. My inhale measurement was 41½ inches and my exhale 37¾ inches, for a total of 3.75 inches and 99% vital lung capacity.

“Congratulations, sir, you’re a completely horizontal breather!” she exclaimed. Then, without missing a beat, she added, “Now that you’re an A student, why not go for an A-plus?” 

You must be joking, I said to myself. But looking into her eyes, I realized that in her view, despite all the work I’d done, I’d just skimmed the surface.

Jim Morningstar, a psychologist I interviewed for this story, describes the breath as one of our most intimate companions because we can’t go for more than a couple of minutes without it. “When you connect with your breath, you’re connecting with your spirit,” he said. “That’s the experience many people have doing breathwork. After a while, they’re not breathing anymore. They’re being breathed.”

Clearly, I still had a long way to go. But I was excited about the next part of the journey because my relationship with my breath had shifted. To borrow Humphrey Bogart’s famous line, it felt as if this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. 

Practice: Rest Your Body

In her book Breathe, Belisa Vranich says this five-minute routine will allow you to reset your body after a particularly stressful day by drenching every cell in it with oxygen—it will be a welcome relief to a body that’s been flooded with carbon dioxide and low oxygen, adrenaline, and caffeine. The exercise will also allow you to quiet your mind so you can hear yourself think and will help you feel centered, balanced, and more connected to your feelings and the feelings of others.

Part One

Duration: two minutes

1. Lying on your back, put one hand on your belly and one on the top of your chest.
2. Breathe through your mouth in order to take in as much oxygen as possible.
3. The first inhale should make your belly rise. (The hand on your chest should not move.) Then, without exhaling, take another inhale and fill the top of your lungs. (This time the hand will move.) These two inhales should be distinct, even if the second one is small.
4. Exhale enthusiastically, for the same amount of time as the two inhales took, combined. 
5. Make sure to continue breathing through your mouth for the entire first part. The first time you try this, you may feel like you’ve hit a wall after 20 breaths or so. If that happens, encourage yourself calmly and firmly to continue breathing. However, don’t push yourself too hard.

Part Two

Duration: three minutes

1. Move your hands away from your body. Rest your arms at your sides, palms up. Let your feet fall outward. You may keep breathing through your mouth or switch to your nose. Relax your lips, your face, and the roof of your mouth. Let your tongue get heavy. Very important: Let your jaw relax. Pay attention to your cheeks, ears, and neck, relaxing them with each exhale. Relax your shoulders and the rest of your body.
2. Continue scanning your body to ensure that you’re not holding tension anywhere. Imagine that with each inhale you are letting yourself float a little higher, and with each exhale you are letting yourself sink a little deeper. Try to move your mind away from thinking and simply keep your attention on your physical sensations. Observe your breath as if you were watching another person. 
3. As Vranich points out, “Relaxing your body so that stress hormones and blood pressure decrease recharges your battery within minutes and encourages mindfulness. Do it as often as possible, ideally every day.”

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Train Your Brain to Build Resilience

It’s one thing to misplace your keys or your wallet two minutes before you have to rush out the door for work. You do your best to breathe slowly, stay calm, and try to think if maybe you were wearing something else with pockets before the early morning mad dash. We all experience these hiccups in life—dropping the lasagna on the way to serve guests, leaving a laptop on a plane, learning that the car needs a new transmission—and these hiccups can create quite a startle in the nervous system. Our capacity to cope with these inevitable ups and downs is then further tested when we layer on our own critical messages: “You stupid klutz!” or “I can’t ever get anything right” or “I knew it.”

But usually we can right ourselves again. We put on our big-kid pants, face the distress of the moment, and deal.

Occasionally we are called on to deal with greater troubles and adversities, not just hiccups but earthquakes that overwhelm our capacities to cope, at least temporarily. They include troubles like infertility or infidelity, a diagnosis of cancer, losing a job several years out from retirement, a child arrested for selling pot, or a son wounded in combat overseas. When these bigger bumps happen, we have to dig deeper into our inner reserves of resilience and our memories of times when we’ve successfully coped before, while also drawing on external resources such as family and friends. Here, too, finding our way back to our center, our inner equilibrium and ability to cope, can be more difficult if we are told we are—or perceive ourselves as—less than capable, less than skillful, less than good enough, or unworthy of help.

When these bigger bumps happen, we have to dig deeper into our inner reserves of resilience and our memories of times when we’ve successfully coped before, while also drawing on external resources such as family and friends.

And then there are times when too damn many disasters happen all at once: We lose a child in a car accident, or cause a car accident, at the same time that an aging parent has a stroke and a freak thunderstorm causes flood damage to half the house. When catastrophes like these strike, we are vulnerable to losing our resilience altogether, temporarily or even for a long time. If we have experienced too many unresolved traumas in the past, we can be especially susceptible to falling apart and not being able to recover. When our reserves are already depleted, we can begin to feel like we’re just barely afloat and about to go under.

How in the world do we bounce back from traumas like these? By strengthening our resilience.

Resilience—the capacity to bend with the wind, go with the flow, bounce back from adversity—has been pondered, studied, and taught in tribes and societies, in philosophical and spiritual traditions, and through literature for eons. It is essential to the survival and thriving of human beings and human societies. 

We now also know that resilience is one behavioral outcome of a mature, well-functioning prefrontal cortex in the brain. Importantly, whether we’re facing a series of small annoyances or an utter disaster, resilience is teachable, learnable, and recoverable. It takes practice, and it takes awareness, but that power always lies within us. 

Your Flexible Brain

All of the capacities that develop and strengthen your resilience—inner calm in the midst of the storms, seeing options clearly, shifting perspectives and responding flexibly, choosing actions, persevering in the face of doubt and discouragement—are innate in your being because they are evolutionarily innate in your brain. 

Neuroplasticity means that all the capacities of resilience you need are learnable and recoverable. Even if you didn’t fully develop your capacities for resilience in early life, you can develop them now. The neural networks underlying your coping strategies and behaviors can be shaped and modified by your own choices, by self-directed neuroplasticity. 

This requires the engagement of the prefrontal cortex, the center of executive function in the brain. It’s the structure we rely on most for our planning, decision-making, analyses, and judgments. The prefrontal cortex also performs many other functions essential to our resilience: It regulates function of the body and the nervous system, manages a broad range of emotions, and quells the fear response of the amygdala. (That quelling is essential for resilience!) 

We now know that experience is the catalyst of the brain’s neuroplasticity and learning for our entire lives. At any time, we can choose the experiences that direct the brain’s learning toward better functioning. Resilience can be diminished (for example, by the impact of acute trauma) or strengthened (through the perception of safety; by being understood and accepted by another person; through conscious reflection, such as mindfulness; and with the cultivation of positive emotions) at any time by experience. 

How Emotions Impact Resilience

Just simply being alive evokes emotions. We experience one emotion after another every single moment of the day: delight in watching a sunrise, frustration at getting stalled in traffic, resentment when a coworker takes credit for an idea we came up with, terror for the future when a spouse or child gets a life-threatening diagnosis. 

Whether we like having these emotions or not, whether we trust them or know what to do with them or not, our feelings constantly filter our perceptions and guide (or sometimes misguide) our responses to all of our experiences. In that way, our emotions play an integral role in our resilience.

When the self-regulating capacity of your brain is functioning well, you can inhabit or quickly recover a felt sense of centeredness, ease, and well-being after an upsetting event. You regain your equilibrium. From there you can perceive clearly what’s triggering your emotions and discern what a wise response to those triggers would be. 

For example, we know it’s not resilient to be hijacked by floods of emotions: You can’t think straight, and your responses may be useless or harmful. And it’s not resilient to try to repress your emotions. For one thing, it takes an enormous amount of physical and psychological energy to do that, energy you would be better off using to respond to the situation or to other people wisely. Secondly, when you try to repress any specific emotion (anger, grief, and shame are common targets), you can wind up damping down all of your emotions, even the helpful ones. You can go flat in your being and lose the motivation to do anything at all. 

Taking Back the Reins

What you can do instead is learn to manage surges of negative emotions and intentionally cultivate positive ones, such as kindness, gratitude, generosity, delight, and awe. Positive emotions shift the brain out of the contraction and reactivity of the negativity bias, into the receptivity and openness that increase your response flexibility. The direct measurable outcome of these practices is resilience.

Focusing on positive emotions is not meant to bypass or suppress dark, difficult, afflictive ones. Your experiences of angst, pain, and despair are very real. But you can learn to acknowledge, hold, and process those emotions. You broaden your habitual modes of thinking or acting and build enduring, resilient resources for coping. These include increasing social bonds and social support and deepening insights that help place events in a broader context. You find a way through, and come out the other side.

All emotions—the ones you dislike and dread as well as the ones you welcome and enjoy—can guide your behaviors in resilient self-protecting or self- enhancing ways. You don’t have to be afraid of your emotions, be stuck in them, or be swept away by them. You do have to take responsibility for how you experience and express them.

Practice: Taking In the Good

1. Pause for a moment and notice any experience of kindness, gratitude, or awe that you have experienced today or remember from the past. Maybe your neighbor drove you to and from work for three days while your car was in the shop, or you saw a blue heron rise up from a pond at dusk.
2. Attune to the felt sense of the goodness of this moment—a warmth in your body, a lightness in your heart, a little recognition of “Wow, this is terrific!”
3. Focus your awareness on this felt sense of goodness for 10–30 seconds. Savor it slowly, allowing your brain the time it needs to really register the experience and store it in long-term memory.
4. Set the intention to evoke this memory five more times today. This repeats the neural firing in your brain, recording the memory so you can recollect it later, making it a resource for your own sense of emotional well-being, and thus strengthening the inner secure base of resilience. 
5. As you experience and re-experience the moment, register that not only are you doing this, you are learning how to do this. You are becoming competent at creating new neural circuitry for resilience. 

Practice: Tune In to Act Wisely

The practices of attending and attuning will begin creating the space to help you respond to emotions in a new and more resilient way. Regular practice will make it easier to shift from negativity to positivity. Apply the principle of little and often. Practice again and again until these skills become the new habits of perceiving and responding to your emotional landscape. Then you can choose your response. 

Attending

This practice can deepen your capacity to become present to and consciously aware of your experience without needing to leave or push it away to maintain your emotional equilibrium.

1. Sit quietly in a place where you won’t be interrupted for at least five minutes. Come into a sense of presence, knowing you are here, in your body, in your mind, in this moment, in this place.
2. Whatever body sensation, feeling, or thought comes up, simply notice it, acknowledge that it has shown up on your radar, allow it to be there, and accept that it is there. At this point you’re not wondering about it or trying to figure it out, just attending to it enough to register the experience in your awareness.
3. At this stage in the exercise, you have come to a choice point. You can let go of attending to the experience of the moment and refocus your attention on the quiet, spacious awareness, or you can attune to the felt sense of the experience to decipher its message.

Attuning 

This practice entails discerning the particular flavor of an emotion. It helps you learn to label complex, subtly nuanced emotions, such as those of feeling lonely or suspicious, which builds your emotional literacy.

1. See if you can identify any feeling or sensation in the experience you were attending to in your body. Begin to label it—shaky, tight, churning, bubbling, contracting, expanding. Try not to create a story about it. Just feel it and name it.
2. Sometimes it’s a challenge to put your finger on the exact nuance or flavor of the message. So just try to find a good enough label for now: “This is contentment,” “This is aggravation,” or “This is despair.”
3. Whatever feeling you are attuning to, and however you choose to label it, this feeling is what it is. All you have to know at this point is that you can know what it is and label it in a way that is useful to you. You can trust in your ability to know and label a feeling even if you change your mind later about what it is. Once you can name an emotion, you are on the way to making sense of it and taking wise action toward dealing with it.

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Encouraging Meaningful Conversations about Race and Trauma

The Research On White Privilege Blindness

Back when my daily commute was a two-mile power walk through Manhattan, my idea of “fighting traffic” didn’t mean dodging cars or dashing across intersections seconds before a red light. It was more literal. When drivers sped through a yellow light and blocked my crosswalk, I’d pound on their trunk as I edged behind their bumper: “Nice going, idiot!”

And if they looked around for the culprit, they never suspected it was me. Female, white, middle-aged me.

Getting away with pedestrian road rage is the least of the privileges that age, sex, race, accent, or wealth bring. Being born into one racial or economic group or another—what group is privileged depends on the society, but most of the research focuses on the discrepancies between white and Black people in North America—offers you greater or lesser access to influential networks that can give you that all-important leg up. Accidents of birth can improve or worsen the odds of growing up in a safe, clean neighborhood with good schools and cultural opportunities. 

These “accidents” also determine your risk of someone calling the cops on you for driving while Black, barbecuing while Black, shopping while Black, or sitting in a college common room while Black, to mention a few recent news-making incidents. 

Unearned advantages go a long way toward explaining why white people in the US have greater life expectancies than Black people (79 years vs. 75.6), higher lifetime earnings, higher average wealth ($919,000 vs. $140,000), and higher median weekly earnings ($935 vs. $737). And is it really too much to wonder whether the taken-for-granted, rules-are-for-little-people sense of entitlement that white people enjoy might have been a factor in the 2019 college admissions scandal, where it came to light that wealthy, privileged, mostly white parents had bought their kids’ way into Yale, the University of Southern California, and other selective colleges? 

If you insist those real-world advantages have nothing to do with racial privileges starting at birth, but instead reflect your personal merit and hard work, keep reading and see what you think.

Born to Privilege

“Most whites are blind to the existence of racial privilege,” says psychologist Taylor Phillips of New York University. “They deny it exists.” In fact, 55% of white people in the US claim they suffer racial discrimination and that racial minorities enjoy privileges, according to a 2018 analysis by researchers at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.

Of course, racial preference and affirmative action programs, aimed at improving minority access to education and jobs, exist. But countless studies have connected accidents of birth, especially race but also sex, to life’s outcomes. Some factors are measurable—think parental education and income (both of which usually favor white people) and neighborhood quality. Others are less so—for example, the ability to tap into networks of people (mom and dad’s friends, neighbors, parents of schoolmates) who can offer an edge and an in. 

Phillips is one of the leading researchers trying to explain the causes of “privilege blindness.” This is a form of something psychologists call motivated reasoning, in which we perceive the world in ways that mesh with our personal beliefs about what is right and what we want to be true. A series of surveys has found that Americans of all races misperceive the wealth and income gaps between Black and white people: The average white family has twenty times the wealth of the average Black family, but participants guessed it was 80% smaller than reality, according to the work of psychologist Jennifer Richeson of Yale University.  The least accurate guesses came from wealthy white people: They are motivated to believe society is fair, Richeson explains, since acknowledging the opposite would be to cast doubt on the fairness of their wealth.

Privilege blindness seems to spring from two deeply human urges: to maintain a belief in one’s innocence and to feel meritorious.

Privilege blindness seems to spring from two deeply human urges: to maintain a belief in one’s innocence and to feel meritorious.

In Western societies, particularly those that believe hard work brings success, people want to feel that their accomplishments are earned. “Meritocracy is how we justify unequal outcomes,” says Phillips. “We want to explain them as the result of hard work and talent.” That’s a difficult position to maintain if being white gives people a leg up. But class is another source of privilege that its recipients prefer not to acknowledge: The child who gets into Princeton because her father gave $5 million for a building is certain her success reflects merit, and the teens who got prestigious internships thanks to the intercession of their wealthy, powerful parents’ friends are sure they were the best candidates for the position. 

In one experiment by Phillips and Brian Lowery of Stanford University, white participants completed a survey and read essays about racial inequality in America (specifically, white people’s advantages) and about childhood memories. They remembered many more “personal life hardships” compared to white volunteers who did not read the essays, including agreeing with such statements as, “There have been many struggles I have suffered,” and “My life has had many obstacles.”

“Whites respond to evidence of racial privilege by claiming their life was filled with hardships,” Phillips says. “We want to feel like we’re good people, which presents a conundrum when we’re faced with the existence of white privilege: It can make us feel that we didn’t earn what we have. So we say, ‘Privilege? What privilege?’”

 In another study, Phillips and Lowery found that white participants who read about racial privilege and possible unearned advantage claimed to work harder than those who read a completely unrelated essay. “We’re all motivated by a desire to attribute our achievements to personal merit,” Phillips says.

Real-life experiments, not only laboratory ones, bear this out. People who win a job through contacts rather than hard work or merit “nevertheless claim that their personal effort was responsible for their success,” Phillips and Lowery wrote in a 2019 paper analyzing privilege blindness.

White Fragility 

Research on blindness to white privilege coincides with the recognition of what author Robin DiAngelo calls “white fragility.” It means that white people “freak out” at the slightest reminders of racism, she argued in her 2018 book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.

DiAngelo reached that conclusion over the course of two decades running diversity-training workshops for US businesses, finding that white participants almost universally insist they are “color-blind,” talk about their minority friends, and boast of all their anti- discrimination activism. Challenged by unpleasant reminders of racism, they react with “anger, fear and guilt,” DiAngelo writes, as well as “argumentation, silence, and withdrawal from the stress-inducing situation.”

That, too, might drive privilege blindness, but while DiAngelo is nearly despairing about white fragility, Phillips is more sanguine. People can cast off their blinders and be mindful of the existence of white privilege, but mindfulness extends past merely correctly perceiving reality: It can facilitate introspection, causing us to question why recognizing racial privilege is so threatening to those who benefit from it, Phillips says. 

Especially when a little introspection will likely reveal what some of us can get away with, due to our race and gender—well beyond pounding scofflaw cars.

Try This Practice

Recognizing our own privilege starts with being dispassionately, mindfully open to the possibility that it exists. Some simple steps:

1. Ask yourself if you belong to a privileged group. Societies differ as to their privileged groups, but in general, Western societies privilege those who are white and wealthy.
2. In daily life, when you get away with something or get treated to a perk, ask if someone who looks different from you would have gotten the same treatment. For example, if you’re white, you probably won’t be hassled for loitering in an upscale store, complaining loudly in a restaurant, jaywalking, or committing some other social infraction.
3. Now think about whether privilege has brought you something more valuable than a store clerk’s tolerance. If you have benefitted from networking, academic or professional recommendations from influential people, or even good schools, ask whether you got them, at least in part, because of an accident of birth rather than because you labored hard for them. Not everyone who winds up on third base hit a triple.

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